Network communication, such as web access, enables millions of users around the world to download multimedia content, including web pages containing text, images, video, and sound data and programs.
However, fast and efficient delivery of multimedia content is becoming an increasingly difficult task as the number of web pages and the size of web pages continue to increase. Additionally, International connections having low bandwidth can also lead to slow content delivery, which may cause frustration to users, particularly on channels such as dial-up or cellular wireless networks. Efforts have been made to accelerate web access and/or give the perception of acceleration in order to improve the satisfaction of the end user. For example, some conventional methods related to web acceleration or user satisfaction improvement include the following:
One conventional method proposes to enhance the operation of a web browser by reducing the waiting time perceptually through the display of some cached information. Specifically, when the user clicks on a link, the link is activated by the browser to request downloading of hypertext documents from a remote server to the browser. While the user waits for a reply and/or as the hypertext documents are being downloaded, the browser displays previously cached information such as advertisements, messages, fill-in forms, notices from the service provider, or some third party. This approach has the drawback that, when first downloading a page, there may be no or very little information in the cache. Further, the user may not be interested in this information since it does not necessarily relate to the page requested.
Another known system involves a system for improving the delivery of web content by grouping and reordering the content in a content stream based upon user content preference. Since web content designers usually order the content components according to a logical display order rather than an effective delivery order, grouping and reordering components within a content stream based upon user content preference and the known capabilities of the requesting computer can improve content delivery to a certain degree. For example, a user of a requesting computer that is not equipped to play audio content can filter out the audio content from the content requests. In this situation, parts of a web page can be removed to provide greater speed, however this means that the user misses a part of the information on the web page.
A further known system describes an acceleration device positioned inbetween the web server and the remote client on the computer network. The acceleration device typically accelerates the web resource transmission by filtering at least a portion of the non-renderable data (e.g., comments, white-space, hard returns, meta tags) from the web page source data and/or by creating a smaller version (e.g., compression and/or lower resolution) of the image data and sending the smaller version to the remote client. This method is basically directed at compressing the overall HTML data that governs the structure of the information on a web page.
When delivering multimedia content objects such as images, the size of the objects may consume large amounts of bandwidth, even when compressed. Compressing multimedia objects to a smaller version also has a limit. If the compression ratio is high, a reconstructed image may be of unacceptable quality for the end user. As such, adding further compression to what may be an already compressed object file further affects the quality. On the other hand, an image having acceptable quality may be large and may take a long time to download. Since the complete image is generally delivered to a client before being decoded and displayed, an end user may have to wait a long time before viewing the images.
Further, it may not be possible to filter some objects, such as, images, based on content preferences. For example, if there is only limited information available for an image, it would be difficult to filter to allow loading of only those images that a user wants to see.
Therefore, there is a need to improve the delivery of multimedia content over networks. In particular, there is a need to improve the delivery speed or perceived delivery speed of multimedia content, including images. There is also a need for a method to allow a user to selectively view multimedia content received through a network.